Today, compliance is built for systems controlled by people. Policies assume human oversight, regulators expect human accountability, and audits track human actions.

But what happens when the system acts without you?

By 2026 and beyond, we will see AI agents negotiating contracts, transferring funds, enforcing rules, and even updating themselves. Blockchain-based smart contracts are already executing millions of transactions daily without a person pressing “approve.” Autonomous AI systems will soon take this to another level.

The compliance challenge

Traditional governance frameworks are not designed for autonomous action. How do you audit a decision made by an AI that rewrote its own code? How do you assign liability when a smart contract executes incorrectly across hundreds of jurisdictions in seconds?

Key questions organisations must face

• Accountability. If an autonomous AI makes a harmful decision, who is responsible? The developer, the deployer, or the AI itself?
• Transparency. How do you explain the logic of a contract or model that evolves dynamically?
• Jurisdiction. Which country’s laws apply when a smart contract triggers in multiple geographies simultaneously?

Early responses

• The EU AI Act places strict requirements on transparency and human oversight, but it assumes humans still hold the reins.
• ISO 42001 provides governance scaffolding for AI, yet it too is rooted in traditional accountability chains.
• Legal scholars are already proposing frameworks for “algorithmic liability,” where responsibility is distributed across creators, owners, and users.

What this means for business

• Maintaining audit logs that capture AI decisions in real time.
• Introducing “kill switches” and fallback systems when autonomy risks spiralling.
• Mapping cross-border risk before deploying smart contracts at scale.

A vision of the future

Compliance in an autonomous world will look less like paperwork and more like engineering. Regulators will demand technical safeguards, not just policies. Auditors will inspect code as much as contracts. Governance will become an architectural feature, not an afterthought.

The bottom line

The future of compliance is not about slowing down innovation. It is about ensuring that as AI systems act independently, trust is not lost in the process.

Autonomous systems may rewrite the rules of business. But the rules of accountability, trust, and governance will still decide who scales and who collaborate.